Things Behind the Sun
by Miss Lonelyhearts
Summary: Morrigan must leave the relative safety of the only home she's ever known in search of a better life in what's left of the post-Blight world. Written as part of the Dragon Age Reverse Bang challenge, and based upon the lovely, evocative artwork of pollencount. Greatest thanks to afragmentcastadrift and flutiebear for being such terrific, patient betas.
1. Chapter 1

Morrigan had learned about the bubonic plague in school. For days she'd fallen asleep reciting the approximate number of the dead, seeing in her dreams the gruesome paintings from her textbook. It had been impossible to envision two hundred million human beings, and to then think of them as unmoving bodies in two hundred million graves. But they hadn't all gotten graves, and none of the school texts mentioned much about the daily lives of those left behind. And that's what she'd wanted to know most of all. People dying hadn't interested her half as much as the survivors, the immune, and how they had managed.

Standing among the books she'd kept, Morrigan had felt sure that a more comprehensive text on pandemic survival would surface. Of those who'd lived, there would be eager storytellers. The Blight had seen to that. It was a better name than _Black Death_, at any rate, and its devastation exponentially higher.

Morrigan had fled London when Flemeth died. With a fresh half-shave across her head, wearing a fur coat and a pair of thickly-soled, knee high Doc Martens, she'd packed up and finally evacuated. She'd walked a month's worth of tread from her boots, heading north toward Scotland, toward a castle she'd only heard about, and wondered who would write the textbooks. How many little girls would be born, grow, and lie awake to wonder how the un-tainted had gotten on afterward? Morrigan had doubted there would be enough of a society left for schools, much less children to fill them.

Reaching the highland border, she'd abandoned the concrete tangle of highways and took to farm roads and backcountry.

The hallmark of a survivor's life was struggle, even before disaster flipped them all over into wretched beginners again. Enduring hardship was the nature of animals. The vast heather fields she crossed were full of their evidence. But as Morrigan knelt in the peat and watched a ghoul sinking into a bog she could hardly call the blighted creature animal. Indeed, it struggled with as much sentience as a bit of newspaper blown against a telephone pole.

Ghouls were not trash, exactly, and Morrigan had never truly understood them.

_Pity we can't even address them properly. Do you think this one wore stockings? Perhaps he'd been a lorry-driver?_

"Much as before, it does not matter now," Morrigan said aloud. The ghoul whipped its flesh-peeled head toward the sound, reaching and whining in response. Its teeth were long gone, though the fingernails still grew, and it searched for her with pink, jellied eyes. The bog was deep, but no more than eight feet in diameter. She wondered if the ghoul had followed a sheep across the heath and simply walked into the hidden muck, calm as you please.

She looked up to the clouds, and then across the hills toward the sloping horizon where there would be snow by morning.

"The birds will not have you," she said to the sky, and then sighed down at the creature. "That is a comfort, I should think."

Its head lolled. The ghoul gurgled and worked its knees deeper into the stinking black pit.

_It doesn't know comfort from crumpets, girl._

The voice, silent to whatever world remained outside of Morrigan's head, propelled her onward as it had done since she'd left the city. Morrigan nodded and got to her feet, re-slung her pack, and moved carefully across the heather toward the next spot on her map. The blind pilgrimage had taken a month so far, her desire to escape more compelling than any hard plan. And the plan was simply to keep walking, to survive long enough to find the purportedly fortified castle.

A few days beyond the remote, foothill villages that were, but for the dead, just as empty as everything else, Morrigan realized that she was pregnant. She burst out laughing.

The carbonated sting of it caught in her chest and tickled her throat. The sound, so human in the empty wild, sent a startled vole scuttling deeper into the high grass beside the path.

Laughing was an unexpected caloric expenditure when all her bodily resources were already over-strained. Morrigan set down her pack and bent over, gasping, biting back a second wave of laughter. A sharp pain jolted through her ribs.

A bloody baby.

Had she lived, Flemeth would have snorted into her tea.

"Even you, with that forked tongue of yours. . ." Morrigan muttered to the ground, gripping her knees and squinting at the pebbles between her feet. "Even you could not tell a better joke."

_Couldn't I? Maybe I did and you weren't listening, as usual._

Morrigan herself made the best joke of all, in Flemeth's full-length mink. She found the most sublime humor in recalling all the grimy trading folk she'd met in her exodus; The work-worn hands at which Flemeth would have sneered, would have mocked and reviled, had pocketed her grand jewels in exchange for survival necessities. The punchline might have arrived on rotting feet, but Morrigan had known the joke of this world long before the Blight. However, there was no one left to credit her for her cleverness.

"Hmm, have I laughed last, though?" Morrigan murmured to herself, with a shaking hand over her belly.

Near the path she'd taken away from the main road, Morrigan found a relatively dry glen. Some investigation revealed it to be safe enough. A fallen tree with a natural arch of protective branches served as half her shelter. After an hour's work and a few layers of pine boughs, thick and fragrant, she made the domed structure fairly comfy.

There were game trails in the high grass, so Morrigan set three snares with some confidence. There was kindling to gather, and water to collect from the chilly stream further up from her camp. Using a hunter's blade, she scraped birch bark from the deadwood scattered around the forest floor and used it to catch her flint-spark. The sun cowered beneath Scotland's perpetual gray veil, and Morrigan knew enough to expect a weather change at least twice before night. Settling in ate up most of the afternoon, and the whole time her back complained and her legs cramped. Still there were no sounds of people, no ghouls, and Morrigan took the solitude as a good sign. It suited her.

A couple of squalling rabbits thrashed in her snares, and once she had a satisfactory fire built Morrigan collected them. It wasn't her favorite wild-work, nor her best, but she skinned and gutted them with a grimace.

_Keep them and you might make practical fashion out of those ridiculous boots yet._

Morrigan sat up from the stooped work of jamming the rabbit onto a spit. Her head prickled where the shaved side had grown out, uneven but soft now. She smiled, stretching a leg out to consider her Docs, bought at a shop only a month before the Blight hit. Their spotted coats wouldn't match the mink, but warm rabbit fur would be a splendid augmentation to her boots. Wind gusted over the glen, confusing the column of smoke and making her eyes water, and she set her dinner over the fire.

Eating warmed her immensely. Only when the bones remained did Morrigan worry if the rabbit had been tainted. Out here, everything seemed untouched and that had been the whole point, really. Yet there was the ghoul in the peat bog, and she felt like a proper idiot for not having thought of it sooner. But, hunger couldn't be helped, even less than the baby that drove it.

From her pack she pulled an old aluminum cup, filled it with water from her bottle, and balanced it over the flames. After a while the water simmered, and Morrigan reached up to pluck a handful of pine needles, crushing them for tea.

_Ten years in our private purgatory wasn't long enough to teach you anything._

"Is that what you were doing?" Morrigan muttered.

_Got you through it, didn't I?_

"You stayed too long," she replied smoothly.

_Ha! Don't make the same mistake, child._


	2. Chapter 2

London.

When the Blight had not yet reached the pinnacle of its destructive force, Morrigan lived much as she had for all the years before. When there were cigarettes to be had, she would sit on the fire escape and smoke while she tended the plants with dishwater, watching it fall between the iron slats to the sidewalk five floors below. When there was rain, she would lean out from the window and mingle her smoke with the droplets. When there had been a city instead of a half-empty waystation, Morrigan had prowled with the glint of studs in her nose and lip, eyes thick with black liner, leather-loved in the neon night, and slept four hours at most under a blanket of new thrills.

But soon every aspect of living that had once been the thoughtless work of minutes or seconds, became a formidable endeavor. From cooking to simply smoking a cigarette, everything

If she'd been smart she would have planted tobacco in the cracked recycle bin on the roof. It'd never be good for rainwater, at any rate.

That she'd had seeds enough for the herbs on the balcony was dumb luck. Morrigan grew ginger roots, mushrooms and moss in Flemeth's empty closets. In the massive display case that once held a priceless vase, there now lived a collection of spiders that Morrigan fed, and then milked for their venom. Where Flemeth had once entertained questionable men under the dim sparkle of chandeliers, Morrigan had replaced each painting and dead-eyed portrait with rows of dirty pots, plants breaking through to dangle their roots over the silk wallpaper. They overflowed with defiant green.

The high garden grew while everything else wasted, including Flemeth.

Her mother's hands were no more than yellowed plastic pulled over roofing nails, and she pointed to objects for Morrigan to bring her; a mug of tea with a straw, her faded tarot, the hand-crank radio which Morrigan placed on the pillow beside her ear where white wisps of hair stuck out.

"You were never mine, you know," Flemeth croaked, chuckling at the ceiling, thin lips splitting to expose gums that had gone brown with old blood.

"Why no, I do not recall this story," said Morrigan, running a hand across the bare, stubbled side of her own head. She sat on the edge of the bed because it seemed to be the thing to do. "Please remind me again how you rescued me from the pitiful jaws of the third world."

"You could be grateful now and again," Flemeth muttered, blinking her lashless eyes. She hacked another laugh. "But, perhaps that'd kill you quicker than the Blight."

"'Tis not my gratitude you have ever lacked," Morrigan replied, and felt some frost harden inside her spine. The woman dying in her four-poster bed sighed.

"Can't you let your old mother go in peace?"

Morrigan's eyes drifted over Flemeth's mottled forehead, and the wax-white carving of her cheeks. In her day she'd been many things, great and glittering, but... mother?

"Very well," she said, "there is no sport in it now, anyway."

They regarded one another as scavengers do, fear and hope a combustible mixture in tight quarters. In ten years of steady decay, the Blight and the ghouls had never touched Flemeth nor Morrigan, high in their posh flat. But the wicked afterbirth of crime and privation could not be outlasted. Still, Flemeth's eyes were bright, hard marbles inside her head as she took Morrigan's hand.

"Don't let the stew burn, girl," Flemeth said. Her chest didn't rise again.

Morrigan retrieved an old hand mirror and stuck it up under Flemeth's nose to be sure.

"We've not had stew for weeks, mother," replied Morrigan, dropping the pewter-edged mirror back into its drawer beside the bed.

That night, she climbed to the roof after sunset to watch the precious ebb of electricity pulse through the remains of the city, which was blacker each year, pricked by a handful of stubborn lights. It flickered and dimmed, split down a hundred hungry cables to the few places that still abided residents on the outskirts. A half dozen windmills, made of scrap and spit, churned the midnight air and glinted unevenly where they spun. She stayed among the pigeons' nests and rain buckets for several hours, watching those sad points of light until they blinked out for twenty blocks or so - a string of bulbs here, a shop lamp there, the paper lanterns over Hunan Prince - and the greater light at the center of the city strengthened for the loss of the little ones.

Somewhere in the flat below, Flemeth was dead, sinking into the bedding, and Morrigan felt terror for the first time. In the morning she would wrap the body up in sheets, drag it down the five flights to the street, and set it on fire in the alley near the old barricade.

* * *

The day after her mother's quiet death, Morrigan did two spontaneous things: she ventured into the city for a rather large tattoo of a dragon, and she had sex with a man she neither cared for nor would ever see again.

An oily blond Spaniard worked his inking needle from within an ever-changing rotation of ramshackle buildings. He had a different name for himself in each location, though Morrigan never called him by any one of them. But, he had good hands, and he'd previously tattooed the bird on her chest in exchange for six ounces of her homemade medicinal paste.

The violet dragon, she requested of him, would have to be placed somewhere far from her heart, never to rise above it. With delighted humming, he drew the beast's thorny tail so that it appeared to be anchored by Morrigan's foot on the ground. It took hours, and the pain was more dreadful than she'd bargained for. While he worked, Morrigan stared through the studio's grimy window, eyes focusing on the solar panels crammed along the city's rooftops. The needle made her stiffen, and whatever tears she shed had no easy category.

When it was done, she paid him with some of the remaining jewelry, and a handful of pills twisted up in some cling film.

"My dear, it's always a pleasure," said the tattooist, and tried to kiss the back of her hand. Morrigan snorted and pulled it away, raking her painted nails through the mass of hair she'd left long on the right side of her head.

"The last you will have from me," she replied, unsmiling. He smirked and stripped off his gloves.

Outside the cramped tattoo studio, Morrigan turned right and headed into the city, twisting her hair up into a knot.

Several blocks later, as nighttime drew itself across the brick and mortar, over the slow people with wary eyes, Morrigan veered toward The Void's red neon sign. It jutted out from over the club door, dominating a whole streetcorner, bathing the stand-abouts and regulars in a scarlet pool of light. Beneath it, Morrigan spotted an unfamiliar shape, tall with golden hair.

He wore a well-kept officer's uniform and stab vest. Duty-born angles jumped off him, from the tidy boots right up to the shirt which had once been white. He even wore a bloody necktie. Morrigan watched him survey the crowd, how he spied and readied for some unremarkable crime taking place just outside the club.

A man lounging on the curb beside his huge traveling bag was lured away by a girl, a child really, begging for help. Her sick mother! Please won't you come and help mummy? All the while, her accomplice mingled with the crowd, out of sight, a man who could have been her father or not. And as the officer approached them, as Morrigan blinked at the mundanity of it, the accomplice snatched the man's bag and ran. Spying the officer and his ruddy-eared outrage, the girl bolted across the street and around the far corner.

The novelty of the officer's care outweighed, by a small fraction, Morrigan's distrust of badges and undue authority. He would chase them, and she might lose a toy she'd never played with. After a biting moment of hesitation, she stepped forward, put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Your interference will only worsen things."

He wheeled on her, palm skating the head of a baton slung in his belt. When he saw her, though, the officer unclenched himself a fraction. In anger, he was handsome. Morrigan raised an eyebrow. He swore, gesturing back to where both the thieves and their mark had vacated.

"Is this all that's left?" he asked. Those waiting to cross the Void's threshold didn't look at him. But Morrigan did. She stared, and he asked her more directly, "Become a bastard or step aside for them?"

She rolled her eyes at him. He offered her the same, but followed her into the club; a big blonde shadow with an unfashionable sense of justice. Still, lots of people steered aside for him, nodding as he passed. Morrigan loathed them for their misplaced deference. At the bar, he ordered the same as she, a simple glass of vodka, and tried to pay the stone-faced bartender with a handful of cash. While other patrons received their glasses of liquor, sliding small trinkets and unidentified items over to the bartender, the officer's wad of bills lay on the bar untouched.

Morrigan retrieved a jar of herbs from her bag and set it on the bar. A moment later, the bartender slid two glasses forward and sloshed vodka into them with a generous flourish.

"Survival is not a criminal act," said Morrigan, nodding at the bartender.

"Says the lady still holding her bag," came the immediate response from the officer.

He pointed an accusing finger at the bag itself as Morrigan pulled out a small envelope. From the folded paper, she tapped a small amount of dried muscaria into her drink. The mushrooms had grown in the alley atop the remnants of what, exactly, Morrigan did not like to imagine. The flakes swirled down in her glass like glitter in a snowglobe.

"If that is the case, that the world's remaining population is comprised of criminals of varying degree, then your uniform is hardly necessary any more," she said, twirling a finger in the liquor before tossing back half the glass. Her throat rioted. The officer shook his head and Morrigan went on, curiosity cowing caution. "Why do you insist on wearing it?"

"I dunno," he said, turning out small, wet rings on the bar with his glass. When Morrigan continued staring he drank a little and said, "I was proud of who I was in this."

"And now?"

He shrugged.

Around them, the club throbbed with old beats while small clutches of ragged patrons swayed with as much enthusiasm as ghouls themselves might. Without the fog machine, the false magic and the light show, all that remained of her favorite haunt was noise. The officer rubbed the back of his neck, cleared his throat and smiled. Before the apocalypse had left him with dark stubble and heavy eyes, Morrigan guessed that his smile had been a charming thing once. Everyone had been something else, once.

_Pride._

Morrigan finished her vodka and slid off the stool. She put a palm on the muscaria, ready to leave, but the officer spread his hand before her, a traffic-stopping gesture for a world off its wheels. With a steady finger, he drew the paper packet away from her, and when she nodded her consent he tapped the muscaria into his own drink.

"My partner," he began, copying how she'd stirred with her finger. He drained the glass in a single gulp and squeezed his eyes shut. "She thinks we should travel north. Supposed to be a big settlement, a castle in the highlands, that's secluded and 'defensible'."

An older man pushed up to the bar and took Morrigan's spot on the stool. She drifted close to the officer, where his shoulder was widest and his uniform pulled tight. He smelled nothing like the safe, sane places he apparently missed. Flemeth would've eaten him with a spoon.

"She sounds like an intelligent woman." He leaned into her voice at his ear, to her implied smile, when she bent to continue over the pounding music, "You must hate her, of course."

"Sometimes, yeah," he replied, and looked sideways at her, top to bottom, eyes resting on her lips.

There was an abrupt change in the music as a different yet familiar song banged out of the speakers, and Morrigan remembered that there would never be anything new ever again.

She led him to the bathroom, her small hand curled around the broad knot of his knuckles. He let her push him into a ruined stall, the door half gone and hinges wailing through their forgotten work, and she sat him on the cracked commode.

"I'm-"

Morrigan devoured what might have been his name with a kiss full of teeth and unhappiness. The officer stiffened, responded quietly with whatever need was darkest in him, and pushed his hands up under her skirt.

She didn't watch him work her curls aside. With her thick-soled boot propped against the wall, and a stranger lapping away between her legs, Morrigan listened to the relentless thud of the Void's music outside, and focused on the birds chittering in their nest atop the exposed rafters. Their tiny, caviar eyes glinted above the rotted bathroom where a hole in the roof revealed nighttime but no stars. She wanted a cigarette badly.

"You are the better for all this, aren't you?" Morrigan mumbled up at the feathered faces, leaning the shaved side of her head against the cool metal stall. Miserable heat sputtered through her, made her sweat, and darkened the bird on her chest where her shirt sagged open. The dragon itched and burned under her high stockings, and the man made her come despite her distraction, or maybe because of it.

Common garden blackbirds at the end of the world, doing just fine with their bright yellow beaks. They probably had eggs, too.

When she looked down, Morrigan saw that she'd been clutching his hair. A swatch of gold framed by her thigh and the toilet wall. The color of it seemed to catch the best of the remaining shine on his uniform. The officer only leaned his forehead against her stomach, hot breath spreading under her shirt.

"Should I go?" he asked, muffled, and gave her such a weary look that she almost told him yes.

"More, I think," she said, and reached for his zipper.


	3. Chapter 3

Scotland.

Fatigue weighed on her when she started to climb, filling the travel-worn cracks in Morrigan's assuredness. By then, her belly had gotten heavy while the rest sucked tight to her bones like wet cloth, and she managed only a few miles a day through steep terrain. Crossing a valley somewhere between Kinlochewe and Garve, she lost sight of her own feet in the bloody snow-covered heather. When the going got rough, she simply sat, sweating and drowning in Flemeth's mink while her legs deadened from the knees down.

Sweeping aside some of the frost she identified spagnum moss by its rust-colored fibers. Morrigan pulled up several clumps and stuffed them into one of her remaining plastic bags, her dull voice reciting all the beneficial properties as if teaching to the boulders and bunnies.

"Antiseptic," she said out loud, "and water filtration."

_Fascinating. There's sure to be a place for you among the scholars._

Morrigan stuck her walking stick deep in the heather and stood with a groan. Around her were scattered rocks of every size and shape, fat old acrobats long since rested at the end of their tumble down the mountain. She walked between them. Their mossy sides pointed north and so she re-aligned herself.

With the valley behind her, she came to the edge of a gushing waterfall. Somewhere, she thought, the melt had started, the top-down drag of spring. The only way across, the only way that offered something less back-breaking than a day's hike around, was a great fallen pine that had lodged itself over the gully.

"We do not believe in luck, do we?" she asked.

_You've read too many books, girl. Good or bad, luck is half of life_.

"Yours, perhaps," Morrigan replied, lashing her stick to her pack and creeping with care down to the tree bridge. "Not mine."

She straddled the tree and inched herself along its slime-slick length. As she scooted, broken branches and water-frayed nodules snagged her pants and tore the mink's lining. Under her thighs the tree gave a dead groan, and its center sagged with her weight. The baby roiled restlessly and Morrigan pushed forward over the deafening water, over her rising nausea, until the end of the tree passed beneath her and she could clutch her way up to the bank on exposed roots and stones.

Standing upright, breath billowing against the black forest ahead, Morrigan slid her walking stick from its lash and moved. The baby made no more somersaults.

Her years of traversing a ruined city had been about navigating hard, defined edges, every surface a two-faced billboard for opportunity or a death warning. Morrigan found that the wilderness took its shape from a shifting, unbroken line of purity. If nature had a sort of pride, it was in equality. Here, Morrigan felt like one of her spiders, only free. It surprised her to realize that she spent no time mourning the flat or the garden or The Void. Though, she could've done without the snow.

On the other side of the gully, through a thicket of high pines, she discovered an old hunter's shack. The doors had vanished, every window broken, but the chinking in the logs remained intact and the roof was solid. Some rubble remained around the base of the chimney, which looked as if it'd been struck by lightning.

On the edge of the clearing, Morrigan crouched, listening for ghouls or predators or an unholy sense of irony that would have Flemeth cackling. But only the wind buffeted the cabin, and only the birds occupied its eaves, so Morrigan went inside.

There'd been other occupants, that much was evident all over the cabin. What had been a wide-mouthed hearth was full of fallen stones from the ruined chimney, so that whomever used the place afterward built their fires on the floor with some borrowed bricks. Signs of old camps, and even older bedding, were laid one over the other on the dark boards. The shape of a years-gone rug marked the floor. The walls were hung with buck's and boar's heads, and a fat, stuffed porcupine sat on a pedestal. The stand had been shoved aside, the porcupine's nose pushed into the corner, and Morrigan knelt beside it, thumbing the quills.

"Were you naughty?" she asked. Its glass eyes had dust for an answer.

In the hunter's cabinets Morrigan found dozens of proper pelts wrapped in brown paper. There were rabbits and ermine, foxes of every color, and a half dozen beaver skins. She took them all and dropped her pack beside the remnants of the last camp. What sticks weren't damp with snow she built up and lined with stones, but she was far too knackered to fuss with prehistoric fire-making. So the precious matches came out of her pack, the campfire blazed, and the cabin became infinitely warmer despite the corridor of wind blowing from door to door.

The baby was still. Flemeth's voice, too, had ceased its assault on her psyche for the time being. The two of them, the very real and the imagined remnant, seemed impervious to exhaustion. Morrigan accepted them as she did her own bones and blemishes. For traveling companions, though, she could have done better.

Morrigan searched for her sewing kit, selected a thick needle and rough twine, and set to fashioning herself a hood from the pelts. The mink was a bloody mess, anyway. What was one more crudely stitched embellishment to Frankenstein's monster?

She ate great handfuls of berries and crickets, put water for tea to boil beside the fire, and promptly fell asleep with the sewing still in her lap.

* * *

She dreamt. That she knew it was a dream put Morrigan no more at ease.

Flemeth held court in the drawing room. She was Prada-tailored in rich purple, ensconced in her tufted leather chair with the high, curving back. White smoke boiled from her bald head where hair had been, a silken wave endlessly growing. It crept over the chair and filled the room in a hundred directions, ghostly tendrils testing the floor and ceiling like a sea creature in search of egress.

"And what do the leaves say about the future, mother?" Morrigan asked, eyeing Flemeth's teacup where it balanced in her bony hand.

"Bah, I don't need the tea to tell me that," she replied, shaking her head and making her banner of smoke ripple. "There's no such thing any more."

Morrigan picked her feet up off the floor, hugging her knees close as the room thickened with Flemeth's fog. A blanketing cloud that smelled like fish..

* * *

She woke, her eyes springing open to the blurry cabin and her nose twitching to the scent of cooking.

The fish, unlike her dream of Flemeth, was very real. Morrigan bolted up, heart panicking, clutching her belly when it protested instantly. A scant three feet from where she'd dozed off, sat a man roasting two fish over her fire.

He hadn't even startled when she woke.

"You should be more careful," he said. His voice was as deep as he was large, and the words were accented. "Put your fire out before you sleep."

The giant was unmistakably Scandinavian, from the slicked-back platinum hair down across the slate-sharp nose and cheeks, all the way to his hiking boots and parka. Beneath the parka he wore, of all improbable things, a dove-gray suit in three pieces, with a white necktie fashioned into a fat windsor knot.

Morrigan stared at him, a crowd of insults and corrections pushing up her throat. This was her first instinct, rather than to grab the handiest weapon. She flushed with dismay, but remained silent and wide-eyed as the man tended his fish. Her mouth flooded and her belly rumbled.

Deep night covered the cabin with owl-calls and cold stillness now, but it had been light when she'd fallen asleep. If he'd wanted to bash her fool head in and make off with her gear he could have done it ten times over.

_And you'd have deserved it._

The baby tumbled and Morrigan closed her eyes. Were the invisible critics in cahoots now?

"I can trade for some of that," she said, swallowing, pointing at the meal. The big man sat back against the wall and tapped the flat of his knife against his leg. Above him there hung a ram's head, the twinned shadow of its horns jumping in the flicker of gold light.

"Possibly." His eyes ran cost-benefit, over her figure and across her belongings on the floor.

"What? Do I seem an unlikely opportunity?"

"No. But the fish would be wasted, in part," replied the man, his 'th' coming out more like 'deh'. He gestured with his knife somewhere around her middle. Fire glinted off the blade. "Your condition."

"My condition," she repeated.

He turned the fish and continued.

"Under normal circumstances it might be nice. But now. . .a baby is a parasite," he said, pulling back the charred fish skin where it curled back along split seams. If his fingers burned, he never flinched. "It would have been wise to terminate early."

Loads of parasites were beneficial, though, while few men could claim the same. Again her instinct to argue muscled its way in front of basic caution. Morrigan opened her mouth and then closed it, remembering that she hadn't spoken to a living soul in months. The giant of a man had galled her with logic she might have once used herself. She disliked the sensation, and yet . . .

He gazed at her with blunt, blue eyes.

Morrigan stood to stretch her back and legs, dropping the mink in a glossy heap on the cabin floor.

"A normal circumstance is a great many years off, I'm afraid," she replied, unable to convincingly pit herself against her own wisdom. "Should mankind not attempt repopulation, at the least?"

"Of course. That is prudent," he answered, nodding. "But at this time, termination would have been the logical choice."

"'Tis a man's choice," said Morrigan, looking down at him from over the smoke. "Not entirely the same thing."

The smile he gave had no character she could name. He was in every way contrary to her baby's father, which made her return the smile with equanimity.

"My name is Sven," he said, offering his massive hand.

"Morrigan."

She shook it, resumed her seat by the fire, and pulled the mink back over her shoulders.

They ate in silence. Sven asked her nothing about the baby or her long journey, and she learned nothing about him save for the suit. Her curiosity begged an explanation. He'd been in the country on business, telecommunications, he said. The Blight took over too quickly for him to escape. The suit was all that remained of his possessions from Sweden. She remarked that it appeared to be in wonderful condition.

"I am stranded," he said, his own ten years a perfunctory, unseen medal on his broad chest. "I only wear the suit when I need to be reminded that this. . .survival is not enough. I'm going home."

"You stand a better chance than most," she murmured as she picked fish flesh from between hair-thin bones.

"Yes."

When the meal was finished, Sven chucked the scales and bones into the fire and unrolled his blanket. Morrigan fetched snow for melting into tea, and stirred them both a concoction of blueberries and pine with geranium. She almost asked Sven if he'd seen a castle full of people. Having come to the cabin from the north, it was possible. But she kept the question to herself and doused the fire.

As she had every night since burning her mother's corpse, Morrigan dozed with her belly full and fuller still. Sven was quiet, and did not snore. Flemeth's voice reached out in the blackened crevice between waking and sleeping.

_Don't forget the things I sang to you, the lullabies. There's two kinds. The sweet ones full of love and lies. . .and the ones made of life's brutal truths. To kids and dogs they all sound the same. _

_But you know differently now, don't you girl? _

_So, what'll you sing when the night's too long for sweetness?_

"Nothing you will ever hear," Morrigan whispered inside her new hood, and fell asleep trying in earnest to picture high stone walls capped with battlements.

* * *

"My aunts and uncles excelled at this sort of thing, folk remedies," said Sven as he hefted the small package of herbs and unguents Morrigan put together for him. "I thank you."

Morrigan was unused any appreciation of her skill. For a moment, she thought she might kiss his cheek, standing in the doorway like a wife sending her man off to work. She respected his lack of sentimentality, though, and settled for shaking his hand again. Sven shrugged on his pack, giving his nearly seven-foot frame even more bulk.

"Will you go north?" she asked.

"No."

"Then I wish you well," she said, and the words were as new as they were honest.

He gifted her a large pistol with a spinning chamber and a box of bullets. Morrigan watched him walk through the snow with the sun on his back, the three-piece suit replaced with heavier gear and topped with the parka. Sven headed out the way she'd come in, and he didn't wave when he reached the shadowed edge of the clearing.

She'd have been happy to stand in the doorway of the forgotten cabin for as long as her legs would let her. She could watch the sun melt the snow from the treetops, or sit and read while the squirrels chattered at each other. It saddened her not to have found a single book in the whole cabin.

Sven lingered in her mind. Morrigan thought of his enormous back easily taking the weight of his bag, and the suit within it. The baby kicked, and Morrigan snapped to work.

She spent a day unpacking her own bag, assessing supplies and chucking out the useless bits and bobs she hadn't needed after all, yet carried across half the country. To her useful items she added the furs, skins, and the meager hank of leather cording she'd managed to make. She salvaged all of the porcupine's stiff quills, a bunch of long nails pried from the exposed windows with her hunting knife, and a mish mash of claws scavenged from the back of the hunter's cabinet.

_To think, you were a survivalist all along! I'd have bet twenty p that your bag was full of makeup and misanthropy. Heavy tat, you know._

"You never bet on anything you didn't fix," Morrigan returned, wiping her forehead. One piece of flotsam stayed in the bag, exempt from any classification or assessment of its legitimacy. She reached inside to touch the pewter-edged hand mirror, but left it wrapped, safe inside its pocket.

Outside, Morrigan raided eggs from a nest of crossbills who'd built low enough for her to profit from it. She hissed a little when they pecked her fingers bloody. Strange that her spiders had never defended themselves so, even when she broke open the case to free them on the day she left the flat. They'd have fought each other for the right to cover the old place with tremendous, gauzy webs in her absence. The thought of it had her smiling.

With a meal in the near future, her own anticipation simmering, the baby pushed and Morrigan started as if stung by a whip. Soon enough the eggs were gobbled shells and all, tea steeped and drunk, and the cabin seemed to be a memory before she'd even decided the best time to leave.

The castle awaited her. Morrigan felt that even if it was destroyed or abandoned, even if it did not exist after all, she herself no longer waited. That she was perpetually tired and aching only served as a vivid comparison to the years of careful preservation she'd endured in the flat. This was better by far. Since leaving the city she'd occupied each place with no intention to settle, half her mind projected into the next hour, the next cliffside struggle, while her body cajoled her to stay, to sit, to die.

Well, most of her body. The baby stretched, knocking her bladder.

"Bloody severe beginnings you have," she mumbled down to her belly where it overwhelmed her wasted legs. They were strong, but her bootlaces could no longer be tightened around their loss, and her long sleeves dangled like a child's dress-up costume. She would never have bonbons, nor fulfill any fantastical midnight cravings. Morrigan dropped her head, luxuriated in the rolling of her shoulders, and scritched her work-blunted fingernails through the crop of hair growing longer on the short side, and thickly braided on the long. She stared into the amberglow center of the fire. "We are not so different in that way."

_Bah! You've no idea what beginnings you had._

Morrigan snorted.

"But every intention of knowing the end."

* * *

The sun barely took part in dawn's proceedings, and Morrigan woke to a sky grayer than the evening's had been. She shivered, needing to piss but dreading the exposure. The baby kicked and Flemeth cackled down the back of her spine like a train gone through a tunnel. Groaning, Morrigan rolled to a sitting position and tugged on her boots. She yanked a thick, woolen jumper over her dress and hobbled out to the back of the cabin. She froze mid-squat as a sound in the woods arced its way around the clearing, and chilled her worse than the cold air on her ass.

Ghouls.

Their broken chorus of breath-and-moan undulated between the pine boughs, and she saw what seemed to be a hundred of their gruel-colored limbs shuffling through the snow, their birdcage chests pointed toward the cabin. Quickly, she finished what couldn't be helped and bolted for the door without fastening her gaping pants. The pistol had been stowed the night before, thankfully not deep in the backpack but in her herb satchel. But like an imbecile, she hadn't even loaded it.

Outside, the shuffling grew louder, the moaning almost conversational as the ghouls crossed the clearing toward the cabin. Morrigan plucked out the ammo, slammed four rounds into the chamber and turned back to the open doorway with the pistol raised. It shook in her sight-line as adrenaline replaced the trembling work of the cold along her muscles. But beyond the barrel of the gun, out in the snowy yard filling up with morning sunlight, the ghouls had stopped moving.

Those without functioning eyes craned their necks dumbly upward. They seemed to search for a sun they could scarcely remember, while those who saw Morrigan gazed at her from across several yards of snow. Did they smell her?

Morrigan took a small step toward the threshold.

The ghouls breathed and stared and did not move.

They could have been commuters on the Tube platform. Certainly she'd been stared at in those tunnels a thousand times. The sight of their gently swaying bodies reminded Morrigan that she'd not seen a train in years. In ten years the chirping of mobiles from every pocket she'd passed had become an irretrievable legend. She didn't miss the sound. Minutes passed and the ghouls remained unmoving in the melted trenches of snow they'd made.

She checked the path from the opposite door where it curved into the woods and found it clear. Her chest throbbed as her heart screamed through its chemical fear, and the baby kicked once, harder than she'd ever felt. Morrigan gasped and bent over. Outside, the ghouls filled the clearing with their heavy breath, and it swirled up like chimney smoke, but they didn't advance on her.

_They're waiting for you to run. After all, you've got to jiggle the mouse before a snake will consent to being fed._

"Is that it?" she asked the ghouls. Addressing them felt awkward, but Morrigan continued, "If I go on my way, will you chase me?"

The phlegmatic hoard neither answered, nor moved. She shrugged on the mink and its hood flopped over her head. The pistol she refused to put down made lacing her pants awkward, and she set it on the edge of the counter. With an extra layer of warmth, the trembling in her body dimmed, and Morrigan could once again think. Moving was ever her only option, and the baby approved violently, followed by a pain like lightning screeching across her abdomen. She clutched the counter, keeping an eye on the audience of ghouls who moaned along with her.

"Human vagary is one thing. But I cannot begin to understand this," she muttered.

_Do you want to, child?_

Shaking, Morrigan stuffed the pistol deep in her pocket, shouldered her bags and turned her back on the ghouls. Her walking staff, augmented at its knobby head with duct tape and carpentry nails, tapped its way beside her boots over the floor, the threshold, and then the thinning snow. As she made fresh tracks through the wood on the north side of the clearing, the cabin echoed with the sound of bare feet and crashing flesh. They moved through it, around it, and Morrigan glanced back to find them trudging her path, eating up her footprints with their gray tide.

She ran.

Up through the hilly forest until it peaked with bare boulders and yellow, snow-less grass, Morrigan ran. Her uneven weight made it laborious, belly and bag arguing for control. Running became jogging became great, heavy strides. And the ghouls followed.

She came down toward a river valley that'd been devastated by fire. Here there were no branches or brambles, only charred pine cones underfoot and the creak of standing deadwood. Her knees ached, stiffening like the thin, blackened trees she dodged. The ghouls didn't tire.

Some fell against the trees and Morrigan heard them go down together, plant and animal snapping off at their dead roots. Morrigan shuffled, lungs on fire. Behind her the ghouls gained. Warm wetness flooded down her thighs. In her head, Flemeth coughed or cackled and it never seemed more real. Sweat glazed her neck and chest. Lightning came again, cutting around the meridian of her navel, and Morrigan stumbled.

"Please," she begged her legs, her blood, her dead mother. There should have been a bed. Isn't that how it was supposed to be? Morrigan dragged herself upright, her back on fire.

Across a narrow pass girded by a sheer drop on either side lay a small glade. It had recovered from the fire with soft grasses and defiant pine shrubs. Stabbing her staff into the frost, Morrigan groaned. With the stick she became an ungainly beast, clenching her teeth in pain and lumbering toward the pathetic, pale eden ahead. The dwindling contingent of ghouls at her back pressed on.

Some staggered and rolled backward down the hill. Those witless creatures on the far edges fell silently down the mountain's face, left and right.. They snagged on dead trees as they went. Morrigan clenched her jaw, listening for the crack of bones on rock. The baby turned. Would she ever tell it about the toilet and the golden hair? Would it ever get chicken pox or hear the Clash? She'd have laughed if there'd been breath for it, and tears came instead.

At the edge of the glade she pulled herself by heartbeats over hard ground. Pain brought her to her knees again, and they were soaked by damp grass. Behind her, the ghouls moaned in commiseration, their numbers hacked down but no less urgent in their interest. They gained. Morrigan could only crawl. She left her staff in the grass, her pack sagged and dropped.

With a burst of panic, she stood and bolted for a copse of trees and high-stacked boulders. Just as quickly she fell again, jamming her shoulder against bark and, leaning hard, she bore down on the rigid pain ripping through her. She flailed at her pants, the laces, sliding down the tree with sap sticking to her face. The baby pressed. The closing ghouls murmured and stood watch in a semi-circle.

Morrigan squeezed her eyes shut.

"Mm-er. . ." Her lips worked about as well as the ghouls'. They mimicked themselves, gaping down at her.

_Mercy? Oh, that's a new trick!_

"Mother," Morrigan whined, voice splitting, and then she pushed.


	4. Chapter 4

The last time Morrigan heard the sound of a baby crying she'd been on the edge of the city. Picking her way through the forgotten military encampments, she had come to a block of flats overlooking a gently rolling park, with a large cemetery waiting just beyond. And the trenches.

These she hadn't seen since her first escape attempt. Then, the body bags hadn't been overgrown with weedy grass and wildflowers as they would be when Morrigan left for good some years later.

Plain and monolithic as a tombstone, the apartments marked the outermost point of the city. As she'd crossed the park, Morrigan had flinched at the sudden wailing of a baby somewhere high in the building. From an open window, its indignant cry had echoed and faded just as quickly. Morrigan hadn't regarded it with much interest other than as a contrast to the dead trenches and toppled mausoleums.

She'd kept a half-eye on the frayed and flapping edges of tarps, sunken under weeds, and moved along.

_Biohazard, they said, and yet . . .biodegradable. It's easy to be degraded when there are bodies enough left to watch._

"The dead do not suffer ignominy."

_Not them, my dear. Us._

It had been too soon since Flemeth's death for Morrigan to argue the use of the word, or to examine the voice itself too fully. So, she had walked on.

Now, though, she was desperate to hear a cry.

He squinted. He writhed. He fisted his tiny hands and turned blotchy red. When she fed him, the baby nursed without so much as a slurp. But he didn't cry. Not even in his first, clotted breath with a family of ghouls presiding, and Morrigan had gripped her pistol and her birthslick child and wept for them both. Not once did the baby scream, and never had she felt more alone.

They traveled north, wedged between frosty peaks. The ghouls followed wherever she went, no matter how many bullets she wasted on them in frustration or claustrophobia. Some lay in heaps when their feet rotted off. For a few moments the others would gather around their expired comrades. Their heartier brethren struck out to clear the bushes of snarling foxes and the odd polecat. The ghouls moved when she moved, halted wherever she rested, but they never bared their teeth at her, never came closer than the length of a car. Though they offered no protest each time she succeeded in bringing one down, Morrigan stopped trying to kill them. Indeed, she began to regard the ghouls rather as crude and rheumy sentinels against the wilds.

A week after the baby's birth, Morrigan and her entourage came upon the girl in the tree.

Gunshots cracked the stillness. The sound volleyed between the mountains, and Morrigan stopped her procession. She put a hand over her mouth. Around her, the ghouls stood with their shoulder slack and their necks craned. More gunfire echoed somewhere over the next rise. Investigation meant involvement. Involvement was no longer a question of singular consequence, but one of mutual destruction. She looked down into the front of the gaping mink coat at the baby's wisp of hair and his eyes, her eyes, blinked back up at her.

Crouching, she approached the top of the hill. A short distance away, clinging to the upper branches of the tallest tree in a cliffside outcrop was the squat figure of a girl. A pair of larger shadows, men in winter gear, circled the tree like wolves. Morrigan saw a muzzle-flash as the girl fired on them.

She pulled her twin pack straps, unsure of what to do. There was her own gun and a dozen bullets. There was the baby to think of. In the setting light, the girl in the tree opened her lungs and bellowed. The raw rage of it made Morrigan's heart thump. Laughter like falling rocks issued from the two men.

In the end, it wasn't her humanity that came to action, it was the inhuman around her. Those that she'd begun to take for granted. In the end, it was the ghouls that moved while Morrigan stood stiff, and their primality shocked her. Spurred by the voices over the hill the ghouls surged around Morrigan, and swept down the slope in a chorus of hungry moans.

Shuddering, she watched the two men attempt to climb the tree while the girl took potshots at them from her vantage. Dirt around their feet sprayed up where the bullets hit.

"Come on, get down and we'll talk it out," called one of the men, dodging, voice pitched between his cupped hands.

"Good_ long_ talk we'll ave, princess." The second man reached for a short crossbow strapped to his back.

In their greed, neither man saw Morrigan's hoard as it descended on them.

She took the hill slowly down, one hand clasped around the baby inside her coat, and eyed the men as they began to scream.

The unarmed fellow jerked and wheeled back too far, and three ghouls shuffled him over the cliff's edge, all four going ass-over-teakettle like drunken fools off a balcony. Meanwhile, a second wave of ghouls flung themselves at the remaining man, who got off a single bolt before the horde toppled him. As Morrigan watched, they clawed him down, bent their knobby spines over until he disappeared between their many legs, and the whole of it appeared as a giant, gray tarantula with a softly flopping body at its center.

Then the cliffside went silent again as the sun winked out behind the mountain. It had taken two minutes, at most.

Morrigan crossed to the tree and the ghouls not occupied with devouring the man parted for her, granting her equally their distance and attention. The girl's rasping, her panic, could be heard above the wet feast at Morrigan's feet. She peered up into the branches. Between bursts of pine needles and thick clusters of cones, Morrigan saw a round face with a pug nose and bright, blue eyes. The girl was older than Morrigan had first thought, and wore distinct camouflage. Still clinging to the tree trunk, she kept her sidearm trained to Morrigan's right, on the ghouls.

"Jesus Christ! Why don't they eat you?!" said the girl.

"Truly, I do not know," replied Morrigan, "but I cannot promise the courtesy would apply to you."

"Uh, yeah."

Morrigan counted her hoard as if looking after a gang of schoolchildren coming in from play. Four were gone, leaving sixteen. Each day she'd picked up two or three lost creatures in the highlands, but how many were left this far north? Sven had been terribly unspecific. Morrigan gnawed her lip.

"I could kill them. They will not struggle," she said. Reaching into her pocket she withdrew her pistol and checked the chamber. "But I have neither the resources, nor the inclination."

"Inclination, uh-huh," said the girl. After surveying Morrigan and the ghouls she exhaled and clipped her gun awkwardly into a holster at her hip. The tree put her a dozen feet or so above danger, but Morrigan marked how she clung to the trunk like a kitten and squeezed her eyes shut after looking down too long.

_What a brave little soldier. How many others like her, do you think? Bigger and harder and more cunning._

The baby wiggled in his sling, against her ribs, and Morrigan's mind slipped sideways into the cleft between vigilance and numb exhaustion. The danger would be what it would be, as ever.

"A fire, then." She set down her pack and went about it without another word.

The girl in the tree, however, refused the civility of silence, and yammered while Morrigan worked.

Sig, a nickname based upon her preferred weapon, was a second lieutenant in the American armed forces. While Morrigan gathered wood and shooed away the ghouls so as to drag off the remains of the ravaged bastard, Sig cheerfully laid out her Blight history. A haze of names and brutal battle anecdotes floated down from the tree in her smoky voice, a voice that didn't match her tiny frame. There'd been a training exercise in Cape Wrath, Sig said, involving freezing water and elemental survival for the purpose of what, exactly, Morrigan did not understand. Sig's regiment had been trapped in the bloody highlands with some English soldiers since the beginning. Though she talked quite a bit, she never explained what she was doing out on her own. Morrigan didn't ask.

The ghouls gurgled and whined at the sound of Sig up in the tree, but when Morrigan's work turned to making fire they backed themselves to the shadows it created, swaying like fleshy chimes in the cliffside wind rather than gather to Morrigan's camp.

"Point being," Sig said, sighing as the fire bloomed beneath her and Morrigan finally sat down, "for eight years that castle held. Still does." Settling her back against the cliff, peeling off the mink, Morrigan paused at the word 'castle'.

"Oh crap, I had no idea," Sig said, pointing at the baby. She leaned forward to peer down at them both. "As if there wasn't enough shit to be scared of out here."

"The child does not terrify me," Morrigan replied, laughing. "But, yes, his existence makes things. . .difficult."

Sig murmured on about soldiering while the fire blazed and Morrigan made a meal of her dwindling berries and roots. She interrupted the monologue to offer some to Sig, who wrinkled her nose a little and declined. From her pocket she withdrew a handful of walnuts and cracked them together, raining shells on Morrigan's fire.

"Worst part of it is the heights," said Sig after a moment of blessed quiet. She stretched carefully on the fat tree limb. "Jumping out of planes, offa boats. Yeesh."

"And yet, there you are," Morrigan mumbled, cradling the baby and drinking her tea. The warmth traveled her skin, from belly outward and back again.

"Here I am," came Sig's chipper reply.

When the baby seemed ready and reaching, Morrigan opened her dress, pulled aside her threadbare undershirt, and began to nurse. She leaned back to find Sig staring down through the branches in wonder.

"Nice tat. I've got a few, too."

She realized Sig had been staring not at the nursing baby, but at the black bird stretching beneath Morrigan's clavicles. When she looked up again, Sig had rolled her left sleeve back and spread her collar, displaying a series of geometric designs in jagged swirls of blue-black around her arm, chest, and shoulder.

"Indeed." Morrigan closed her eyes and winced slightly at the tugging sensation flowing from her breast. The baby tangled his fingers in her dirty braid.

"Got any more ink?"

Morrigan blinked up at the stars.

Releasing Flemeth, exposing her to a warm fire and a stranger's gaze, wasn't any sort of triumph. It was a cold, pained conversation, a blood-borne disaster, and it was to be hers alone. The creature in question had been so quiet, why poke it awake? Sig nodded, her short hair flopping forward to join her fringe over raised brows. Rolling back her skirt, Morrigan used her free hand to unlace her boot and pull her pant leg over her knee.

Firelight made the violet dragon rage magenta across her winter-worn skin. Up in the tree, Sig whistled shrilly, appreciative, and the ghouls moaned in the dark beyond the camp.

"Jeez what a beauty," she said, and motioned for Morrigan to turn her leg this way and that to get a better look. "Can't believe there are any artists left in the world."

Together they appraised the tattoo, its frozen fury and its accord with Morrigan's curvature. Beauty was beside the point, and always would be, but the Spaniard had earned this overdue approval. She looked off toward the south and wondered absently if he was still alive, still poking ink into someone's skin somewhere. Off in the ash-dark perimeter, the ghouls leaned on one another, adding their dry whispers to the shuffle of pine boughs in the wind.

After a moment, Morrigan shook her head and made a place for the baby on the ground, nestled against her pack in a bundle of pelts. Then she re-dressed herself and laid down beside him with the mink. As usual, he made no sound. From the deepest pocket in her pack, Morrigan pulled the pewter hand-mirror and held it out for the baby to play with.

Somewhere overhead, Morrigan heard shifting, then the clack-and-gnaw sound of Sig's dinner of dried meat. She looked up to watch her chewing, her stubby legs now bound to the tree branch with a length of nylon rope.

"Hey, what's the little guy's name?" she asked, mouth full.

"I've . . .not decided," replied Morrigan, watching the baby drool around the mirror. Gumming the hard metal, he fixed his gold eyes on her, little fingers clenching the mirror's edge.

"Weird. What about naming him after his dad, or yours?"

Morrigan didn't answer, choosing instead to unroll her bedding. Sig's directness didn't obligate Morrigan to answer any more than Sven's particular brand had. What couldn't be sussed was why she cared at all.

"I do not know their names," said Morrigan after a long while. She put an arm under her head, drawing the baby against her side. Once, as a little girl, she'd spoken a foreign language and never considered it as such. Too many years later the same was true, she marveled silently, about sex in a toilet.

"What, either of them?" Sig's incredulity carried no malice. She leaned over the branch to give Morrigan a sympathetic shrug and a half-smile. "Shit. Sorry."

_Oh ho. She won't be the last to look that way. This inquisition will be as much a part of him as whatever name you choose._

She stared into the campfire. Flemeth wasn't there in the flames or the crocodile-charred wood. She'd cleaved herself to Morrigan's doubts, like tapping a phone, and listened for her chance to tear open secrets that Morrigan had only guessed at.

"It was not important when it should have been," she said to the fire. "And now, even less so."

The voice in her head did not argue.

Sig had filled Morrigan with a new voice, insistent but not wholly unwelcome. But now that the soldier was mostly silent, Morrigan festered with ten thousand questions about the castle. She let the fire burn well after they'd drifted too close to sleep, and decided not to douse it. If more men came, the ghouls would be protection enough.

In the tree, Sig yawned.

"Why don't they attack you?" It didn't seem like a question for Morrigan, but more like something for scholars. Morrigan turned in her bedroll. Sig shook her head. "It makes zero sense."

"I. . .do not know," Morrigan said, because it was true, and hesitated before adding, "But I have a theory."

"Do tell." She heard the clang of a canteen, the gulping of water.

"The baby," she replied. He slept, as quiet in his dreams as during the day, and Morrigan smoothed a finger over the perfect arch of his brow. "I believe the baby makes all the difference."

Sig made a snorting sound. "How on earth could such a little dude make a difference?"

"T'isn't a logical conclusion, but it is the only variable in my case," Morrigan replied, stiffly. His father moved people aside with his very presence, why not their child?

_Because these followers of yours aren't people, girl._

"Did they ever come after you before?" Sig asked, sinking back into the crutch of the tree.

"Once, when I was young," said Morrigan, and swallowed as if it could crush the pounding of her heart, or keep that bloody muscle from reacting at the very thought of her early childhood. It seemed to carry a memory that she herself did not. Now, when Morrigan most needed Flemeth's explanations, cryptic or otherwise, the bloody voice was silent. More consistent in death than she had been in life.

"Maybe you smell like one of them," Sig replied, sniffing. "God knows I do."

Sig laughed, a quick, intoxicating thing, and Morrigan found herself smiling into the crook of her arm. Yes, she smelled like a wild animal. A little blood, a little decay. Living meant sweat and shit and this new, milk-thick stink that clung to everything. But Sig was wrong. Though ripe and profoundly dirty, she did not smell like a ghoul.

Under her blanket, Morrigan laughed a little more. Inky sleep doused her vision, smothered all the flame and every unanswered question except the last one to rise up before consciousness abandoned her.

What if they traveled together?

_Mm, so quick to find friends in high places._

"The highest," she mumbled.

In the morning, though, Morrigan found the tree limb above her camp empty; no Sig and no obvious signs of her departure. A half-dozen new ghouls meandered around the cliffside, observing Morrigan as she searched, whitefish eyes unwavering on the baby slung across her chest. They offered no insight.


	5. Chapter 5

At the blue edge of the following dawn, Morrigan's climb ended. She moved through a dense forest with an uncounted number of new ghouls at her back. Stone markers jutted up along a snow-choked path, and Morrigan followed these to where they ended, stopping at a high wall that extended through the forest on either side of a great gate. The ghouls huffed intermittently through their lipless mouths and followed her into the unlocked gate, its massive, ornamented bars long since rusted to reddened ribs of iron.

Just beyond the wall, Morrigan heard crows cackling in the trees and she stopped. A sudden burst of footfalls fractured the air, getting softer as the unseen runner hurried away. Morrigan thought she heard static, too, and the clicking of a walkie-talkie.

There would be no stealth to her arrival, it seemed. She briefly watched the ghouls as they shuffled among themselves. They keened like stressed timbers while the pop of their bony knees, and their omnipresent breathing, echoed through the black woods.

Lacking any alternative, she pushed on, stabbing her walking stick into the ground alongside her boots. Whatever suspicions awaited her, whatever weapons and wonderings, it didn't matter. The baby squirmed against her chest. The crows beat their wings, cawing again, and she watched them fly until their black shapes led her eyes to the stony face of a castle tower, just visible over the treetops.

Then, she saw light through a break in the trees.

_Ready, or not?_

"Both," replied Morrigan, jaw clenching in the cold, "Neither."

Emerging from the forest, stepping from one fairy tale setting into another, Morrigan found herself at the edge of a broad field of snow. It sat unsullied in the pre-dawn light, except for the arrow-straight tracks of the one who'd run ahead of her. At the end of those tracks stood the castle, big as a battleship. It was a square and scarred remnant of the old world, surrounded by an icy moat and adorned at each tower with a pair of machine-gun turrets.

Her heart and stomach jostled for new positions. Morrigan swallowed and jabbed her stick into the field.

She moved quickly, struggling across the crisp snow, and the ghouls fanned out behind her as they broke free of the trees. Together, she and her unlikely parade cut a wide swath as they moved toward the castle. A tinny voice echoed across the space.

"Lights!"

The snowy field flooded with yellow-orange light as massive machines stationed at the perimeter kicked on, one by one, cascading toward the castle as Morrigan walked. Their generators rumbled. Behind her, the ghouls moaned and staggered along, faces searching out the source of brightness around them. Morrigan glanced at them from around the edge of her hood and kept walking in the artificial light.

Until she made it clear of the last floodlights, Morrigan could not properly see the castle battlements.

She stopped within a dozen yards of the moat. Her breath rolled out from under her hood, gray-white against the enormous castle wall and it's high windows. Dawn had turned the sky to a hazy aqua, darkened under a canopy of clouds. But it was light enough, and she saw them finally. A hundred heads peered over the edge, looking down on her under a hundred woolen caps. The stone battlement bristled with weapons, but no rifles as far as Morrigan could see..

She gripped her walking stick.

Behind her the ghouls renewed their gurgling, a throat-rot sound that had ceased to disgust Morrigan. It was almost like nervous chatter. And for a moment she felt a queer worry for them. She feared they would charge lamely into the water, or swarm around the sides of the castle like baby spiders seeking their first meal. But they simply stood behind her, waiting. And not unlike them, Morrigan looked up into the shadowy faces along the parapet and had no words to offer in explanation or supplication.

A woman's voice, commanding and precise, filled the silence.

"Ignite!"

After a shifting of arms the battlement flickered with fifty-odd points of flame at the ends of crossbows and longbows and anything with a taut string.

Morrigan's heart balked, but she didn't flinch.

"Ghouls-only," said the voice above, "And. FIRE!"

Arrows arced over the wall, black and yellow streaks across the sky, their shafts dry-whistling down to their targets. All but a handful hit true. Morrigan watched burning arrows thud into the upturned faces of ghouls drawn by the light. Some bolts sank into their caved-in chests or destroyed their gray, stringy thighs. All burned, but only a few yelped, and a great many still remained standing. Throughout, Morrigan stood very still, breathing heavily as the flaming ghouls dropped around her. They sizzled on the light crust of snow.

Morrigan felt the injustice, the brutal ignorance of it, like a worm in her skull. Her eyes watered, her throat tightening as if wasp-stung while the ghouls lost their miserable half-lives to fire. Fat tears spilled down Morrigan's cheek as the first archers moved aside for a second wave. She opened her mouth to scream and nothing came out. There were no wasps. She was as silent as her own child, and alone within the smoke of the dead. What had she expected?

There came no reply. Flemeth was absent.

"Second watch. Ignite!" The booming voice ordered another attack.

But those of her ghouls that remained - the one-armed, the blind, those blackskinned with frostbite up to their knees - collected themselves to stagger in front of her. Along the edge of the icy moat, they closed rank as best their broken bodies were able. And for lack of any better description. . .they shielded her. Morrigan gasped, eyes skating past their knobby shoulders to the quivering line of fire along the battlement.

She left her walking stick where it was, stuck upright in the snow. Clutching her arms around herself, around the bulge of the baby just under the mink, Morrigan took a backward step. Then, she took another.

"FIRE!"

Arrows flew.

Ribbons of flame slashed the sky, and again the ghouls caught fire. For a breathless few moments Morrigan's shambling line of defense stood on its dead feet and burned. Their moans grew tired and soft. They dropped to the snow only when their trunks scorched down to bone. Char-thick and greasy, the smell of them enveloped Morrigan. She felt ash clinging to her salt-sticky face. With her strange companions dead, Morrigan felt relief and anguish flood through her. She was alone in the presence of so many.

Again she opened her mouth to speak, but ultimately she was not the one to break the silence there on the frozen bank. Not even the archers, nor the steel-voiced leader atop the castle spoke first in the quiet aftermath.

Morrigan felt something new rattle her chest, a vibration surging against her sternum, something wet and hot on her skin. It was the baby. The baby _cried._

Quickly she unfastened the mink and put her hands on him. His whole body was rigid, and she could almost feel the sound building from inside his tiny lungs. And as she lifted him out of the sling, the sound of his wailing became as big as the castle itself, bigger.

It crackled up impenetrable wall, and echoed backward to the field like a siren, growing louder as Morrigan held him up. He kicked his chubby legs and screamed pitifully in impotent anger. The sound flashed through her like electricity, as if a dormant circuit had been completed, and every light switched on. She wept again.

On the corpse-littered bank, Morrigan hoisted her child, lifting him up for no one but herself, the battlement and its flaming arrows forgotten. Her hood slid back and she smiled up into the baby's face. His golden eyes were squeezed shut, his face red and contorted as he continued to cry. And tears ran off his round chin. The baby squalled and hitched, coughed and bellowed and Morrigan bounced him at the ends of her arms like there was more than death in the world. And no one in the world but they two. No world at all, in fact.

"As long as you like, my darling," she said, fresh pain and pure joy stinging her eyes, "Cry as long as you like."

Morrigan took a deep breath. Looking up, she could see the faces of the archers. With steam rising from their heads, mouths agape, none so much as sniffed.

She tucked the baby back into his sling, unable to stop herself from running her fingers over his face, his hair, his arms, and finally closed her coat around him. Still, he cried. She cherished the feel of it against her body.

Across the moat, Morrigan heard the deep clang of a massive chain within the castle wall. The drawbridge lowered slowly. She did not look up to find the leader somewhere along the battlement, or across the field where she'd come. And she didn't glance down at the dead ghouls around her feet. With dawn fully at her back she took hold of her walking stick and watched her own shadow move toward the open castle gate.


End file.
